HP and Oracle this week continued growing their converged infrastructure products, while Supermicro showed that such capabilities aren't only for the large vendors.
Top-tier data center systems makers continue to roll out prepackaged
hardware-and-software offerings as they look to grow their capabilities in the
increasingly competitive converged infrastructure space.
Both
Hewlett-Packard and Oracle added to their portfolios this week with solutions
that leverage both in-house and partner technologies designed to give
enterprises integrated and easy-to-deploy converged data center systems. Such
offerings are considered by analysts and vendors as critical technologies as
businesses continue their migration to cloud computing environments.
Smaller
systems makers also are making strides in that direction. At the Cloud Summit
East show in New York June 7,
Supermicro and cloud software vendor Nimbula partnered on a solution that will
include Supermicro servers optimized for Nimbula's Director software platforms
and aimed at businesses looking to grow their cloud computing capabilities.
"Awareness
of IT cost and infrastructure benefits in private and public cloud computing is
reaching the masses," Wally Liaw, vice president of international sales at
Supermicro. "Supermicro's cloud-ready server solutions are an ideal
computing platform for Nimbula Director. Supermicro's application-optimized
systems combined with Nimbula's expertise in cloud deployment automation,
operation, and scalability will provide any size enterprise or service provider
with an accelerated, cost-effective path to evolving cloud services."
Such
converged data center solutions got a shot in the arm a couple of years ago
when Cisco Systems rolled out its UCS (Unified Computing System), a tightly
integrated, all-in-one data center offering that includes Cisco-branded server
and networking devices, storage from EMC and
virtualization capabilities from VMware. It also includes management software.
The
UCS has been a solid business for Cisco. IDC analysts said last month that Cisco
is now the number-three blade server vendor in the world, and company
executives said Cisco now has 5,400 UCS customers and an annual run rate of
$900 million for UCS product orders.
Such
integrated offerings aren't necessarily new, but vendor and customer interest
has grown with the rise of virtualization and cloud computing. Now most
hardware vendors are rolling out such converged packages. For example, Dell
in April announced vStart, a pre-assembled hardware and software bundle of
Dell PowerEdge servers, EqualLogics storage and PowerConnect switches that will
be delivered as a single unit and easily deployed. A vStart package will let
businesses initially run 100 or 200 virtual machines with that number growing
later.
As
part of its Converged Infrastructure initiative, HP executives at their
Discover 2011 show June 6 rolled out new and enhanced data
center packages complete with HP servers, storage, networking and services,
and with support for a wide range of virtualization technologies from VMware,
Citrix Systems and Microsoft. HP's AppSystem, VirtualSystem and CloudSystem
offerings are designed to help businesses more easily migrate to cloud
computing environments, according to company officials.
Analyst
generally applauded HP's announcements. Charles King, principle analyst with
Pund-IT Research, said in a note June 8 that the HP's vision of an Instant-On
Enterprise, with systems that provide seamless and flexible support for myriad
processes, makes sense.
"If
this all sounds familiar, it should," King wrote. "Though HP's branding is
fairly unique, the company's go-to-market approach and goals fall generally in
line with those pursued by virtually every other major systems vendor. ... HP's
Converged Enterprise strategy and growing solution portfolio have made the company
more formidable than it has been for some time."
Forrester
Research analyst Richard Fichera said the HP offerings gives enterprises
options.
"With
these new announcements, the virtual infrastructure platform segment of the
[converged infrastructure] space begins to look positively crowded, and now HP
users will have an alternative to the VCE offerings [from Cisco and partners]
as well as Dell's new vStart options when looking at these platforms," Fichera
wrote in a June 7 blog post. "On the integrated application stack side, the
new HP options look like strong choices for users of these complex vertical
stacks."
Oracle
officials have been looking to leverage combined hardware-software offerings
since buying Sun Microsystems last year and inheriting its SPARC systems,
rolling out such solutions as the Exadata database system and Exalogic,
a cloud-in-a-box offering.
On
June 7, Oracle unveiled the Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud
Infrastructure, an integrated and pre-tested solution that combines Oracle's
Sun Blade servers, ZFS storage appliance and Oracle VM virtualization
technology. It will run Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux operating systems, and
comes with Oracle consulting services.
"Oracle
is radically simplifying cloud deployment with a pre-tested, single vendor
solution for enterprise cloud infrastructure," Ali Alasti, vice president
of hardware development for Oracle, said in a statement. "By engineering
our hardware and software together, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise
Cloud Infrastructure cuts deployment time from weeks to hours and helps
customers get virtualized infrastructure up and running faster."
Two
days later, Oracle officials announced they were preloading new virtualization
software onto some SPARC system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1 enables users
to host as many as 128 virtual machines on a single server.
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